With the couples on either side of him as hot as the flames on his grill, our solo-dining yakiniku fan finds a mental escape.

Dining at a yakiniku restaurant in Japan quickly becomes a series of choices to make. Yakiniku menus consist primarily of a wide variety of different types and cuts of meat that you grill yourself, but per-plate portions tend to be small, so you’ll need to make multiple orders to get enough food to fill yourself up.

If you’re ordering a la carte, different kinds of meat have different prices, but many yakiniku restaurants offer all-you-can-eat options that give you unlimited access to certain types, and when our Japanese-language reporter Yuichiro Wasai opted for such a deal on a recent yakiniku outing, you’d think he would have then just ordered based on what kinds of meat he thinks taste the best. Things got a little more complicated, though, after Yuichiro sat down.

At most yakiniku restaurants, the majority of the seats are at tables with space for two, four, or more diners. At some, though, you’ll also find counter seating, and since that was an option on this day, Yuichiro had grabbed a counter seat. However, shortly after that a couple on a date sat down at the counter to one side of him, and then soon after that, another couple sat down on the other side.

In other words, Yuichiro was now sandwiched between two couples, and while they weren’t having full-on make out sessions, both pairs were in clearly lovey-dovey moods, scooched up against each other with their arms around each other as they ate.

Yuichiro found himself feeling increasingly self-conscious as he sat in what was a small buffer zone between the two amorous pairs, but because he was by himself, he couldn’t just focus on any dinnertime conversation of his own, and with his counter seat facing a wall, he couldn’t stare out a window either. However, it was at this moment that he realized that even though he was by himself, he could call on two allies to help him escape his feelings of awkwardness. Who were those saviors?

Beef short ribs and pork belly.

As mentioned above, at yakiniku restaurants you cook your meat yourself at a grill set into your table or section of the counter. Different cuts take different amounts of time to cook, but beef short ribs (kalbi) and pork belly tend to be two of the quicker ones  to grill, which also means that they’ll burn more quickly than others. In other words, you’ve got to pay very close attention when cooking kalbi and pork belly, and the more Yuichiro was focused on his meat, the less he noticed the heat coming off of the couples on either side of him.

With kalbi and pork belly being fairly fatty cuts, they also produce a lot of drippings as they cook, which causes flames to flare up from the grill. Usually this is a startling, or at least annoying, part of the yakiniku cooking process, but Yuichiro welcomed the distraction. Sometimes the flames were so strong that he felt the need to put an ice cube on the grill to cool things down a bit, and again, he was happy to have a reason to concentrate on what was in front of him, rather than on his flanks.

Though they’re not the only dripping-intensive yakiniku menu items, in his experimentation Yuichiro found that kalbi and pork belly have the best combination of juicy drippings and quick cooking time, letting you keep your cooking tongs, chopsticks, and brain in near-constant activity. So even though the all-you-can-eat option he’d ordered allowed him to choose from a broader swatch of the menu, he kept up a heavy rotation of kalbi and pork belly for his entire meal, as they truly are the best choices for someone who feels self-conscious when surrounded by couples.

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Nick Sadler and his wife had different ideas of what a chill Saturday looked like. He considered the weekend a blank slate — no set plans, the family’s moment to reset and chill. She was under the impression that time was up for grabs and put a short hangout on their calendar, which Sadler saw as his wife not taking his schedule into account. To settle the argument, he opened up ChatGPT, specifically the group chat function, which allows more than one human to interact with the technology. Sadler prompted the chatbot to act as a neutral mediator and to instruct them on their next moves. Sadler tells Vox that ChatGPT acted as a trusted friend, or even a therapist, suggesting both of them consider different perspectives. It attempted to pinpoint where the conversation broke down (“Both of you then behaved logically according to your own understanding. That means this is not primarily a respect problem. It’s a classification problem.”) and offered guidelines for future scheduling (“A simple question can prevent most of these arguments: ‘Is this an idea, or are we locking this in?’”)

“It was like, ‘Well, next time just consider this’ and ‘maybe try saying this’ and ‘maybe try doing that,’” Sadler, a film producer, says. “We got some sort of advice to follow, but ultimately we’ve still got to do the work and we’ve still got to actually take the actions.”

Sadler, a 48-year-old self-proclaimed AI enthusiast, is no stranger to utilizing ChatGPT in his marriage. He’s used it to uncover the weaknesses in his arguments and to craft apology texts to his wife. “I put in purpose mistakes so she wouldn’t think I was just using ChatGPT,” he says.

But the pressures of parenting two young kids was kindling for their periodic annoying marital spats. Sadler and his wife considered couples counseling, but once he discovered ChatGPT could guide them through difficult conversations, they no longer felt they needed the help of a professional. One night, while sitting on the couch with his wife, Sadler launched ChatGPT and told his wife to talk to it as if it was a therapist. “In a way, it’s having a therapist on tap,” he says.

That people are turning to large language models to navigate their love lives isn’t entirely surprising. Relationships have peaks and valleys and, many times, exist in an emotional gray area. Chatbots, on the other hand, are authoritative in tone and confident, even when they’re wrong. 

Some people are going a step beyond asking Claude to draft an apology text, and inviting AI into the most intimate moments of their lives: fights with their significant others. In other words, they are treating technology like an on-demand couples therapist. The tech, which could be ambiently listening or addressed directly via voice or text, might suggest someone use more “I” statements or prompt couples to ask questions like “Where did you feel unsupported?” 

Research has suggested publicly available AI, like ChatGPT, is an effective intermediary in a dispute, with human subjects feeling less divided when AI was mediating. But AI platforms lack the emotional intelligence to adequately read a couple’s body language and tone, understand cultural context and power dynamics, and incorporate a couple’s past into the fight at hand.

The desire for an authoritative, always-available guide in the midst of conflict is certainly seductive, but emotional matters are best reserved for human-to-human conversation. “The answer is typically not that you need some type of content strategy on how you should approach your next steps,” Amelia Miller, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, tells Vox. “But it’s much more that you need emotional support, which comes from asking other people that you care about what you should do in the situation, not asking a machine.”

Drawing from a shared reality

In her Bay Area therapy practice, Courtney Quattrini has seen her fair share of couples who leverage AI chatbots in their relationships, including using it as a practice conversation partner and to ghostwrite texts to their significant other. While none of her clients have let ChatGPT or Claude mediate a fight, some do bring in AI summaries of arguments from one person’s perspective to their sessions with her. “They’re ruminating or they’re thinking about their side of the fight: What am I going to come back and say, how am I going to prove that I’m right or wrong?” Quattrini tells Vox. “They’re summarizing the fight from their perspective, and then they’ll bring in the summary and present it almost like it’s objective, but of course it’s not objective.”

But much of the work in couples therapy centers on the idea that two things can be true at once, and is about getting both individuals to understand that their partner’s emotional reality is important. “When you’re coming in and you want to summarize who won a fight, that really doesn’t align with the work that we’re actually doing,” Quattrini says. Feeding AI your narrative doesn’t help you see the things you could have done differently. 

But when both people in a relationship invite AI into the discussion, leveling the playing field, the technology draws from a version of the story that may be more closely aligned with reality. A few months into dating, Khalid Tawohid and his partner discovered they’d both been discussing their relationship with their respective AI chatbots. “How can we get our AIs to just talk to each other?” Tawohid tells Vox.

Earlier this year, the 25-year-old software engineer designed a workaround where both his and his partner’s Claude agents — drawing from each individual’s full chat history — could facilitate difficult conversations. The app, called Bridge, claims to provide scaffolding for the discussions and package disorderly thoughts in a more coherent manner. Instead of looking to a machine to validate your point of view, the machine, ideally, would hold your hand as you attempt that same conversation with a human. “This helps your AI have a real sense of identity of who this [other] person is because it’s two different AIs, one knows one person, one knows the other person, and they’re both vehemently going to defend their own person,” Tawohid says. “But together it gets you to a more shared sense of truth.”

Still, Tawohid isn’t convinced his AI chatbot mediation tool, Bridge, is even a good idea. He has shared Bridge with about 10 couples, all of whom have given him the feedback that they’d use it again, he says, but it isn’t widely available for use. Perhaps, he says, it could be a supplement to traditional couples counseling, a way to practice communication outside of the therapy room.

Ironically, though, Tawohid has come down on the side of mild AI skepticism. “It’s a combination of a journal and a therapist and a friend, but it is also not real. It’s also just a computer code,” he says. When he discovered he’d lost his ability to craft a sentence without help, he stopped writing with AI. Now he fears people could lose their relationships to chatbots, too. 

Gateway to introspection or outsourcing sincerity?

After a few months of using Bridge, Tawohid says he and his partner spend much less time talking to AI. They’ve had enough machine-facilitated conversations that they better understand each other’s thought patterns and triggers. Sadler, the AI-curious film producer, and his wife have similarly come to rely on AI less frequently because, he says, ChatGPT has taught them to be better communicators. “It just taught me to understand that she’s got a different perspective on things. If I’m not understanding where [she’s] coming from, just asking questions to say, well, what do you mean? And not jumping to conclusions,” he says.

Using AI as a therapeutic outlet can be instructive for people who aren’t in the habit of introspection, says Miller, the Harvard fellow. These chatbots can, in theory, be a tool for reflecting on an argument and for rehearsing what to say next. But sometimes the language the chatbot suggests is so far out of the realm of what your partner would actually say that its assistance is counterproductive. 

For Josh Elledge and his wife, the stupid fight began over a haircut — or lack thereof. Elledge, a 54-year-old podcast consultant, was refusing to clean up his look (“I didn’t like something my barber said, and so I stopped going to him,” Elledge says) and his wife was not pleased. So she turned to an AI chatbot for assistance on how to break it to him. What she ended up saying to Elledge didn’t land. “It just made her opinion stronger in a way that wasn’t really helpful,” he says. “She’s conveying this stuff and I’m like, wow, you really think that? And she’s like, well, no, not really.” He says they “thankfully had the good sense” to distinguish between what she believed and what was the AI. 

Once you relinquish enough of your critical thinking to AI, you run the risk of undermining the relationship you sought to fix. Therapists are trained to identify when a fight needs to be slowed, rerouted, or ditched altogether. But because chatbots never tire of hearing about your problems, you can get caught in a loop of rumination, perpetually mulling over the same frustrations and workshopping language on how to tell your husband you hate his haircut. At that point, who are you in a relationship with — a large language model, or a human? “That was an instance where maybe this isn’t a miracle process. You still have to just be really careful about not showing up as someone who you are not just simply because you defaulted to this AI being this authority in all things,” Elledge says.

AI chatbots are programmed to keep you engaged, but endless mediation and reflection isn’t exactly helpful. If you feel compelled to use one to navigate a squabble, give the technology guardrails. For example, Miller has created custom prompts that don’t exceed 10 or so exchanges with the AI and are meant to illuminate your own biases and shortcomings. But, ultimately, Quattrini, the therapist, says it’s important to remember that true counsel comes from a human who possesses the ability to read nonverbal cues, affect, and changes in body language. “Right now I think AI is a pretty dangerous mediator because it doesn’t have a nervous system,” she says. 

The joy of being a person in a relationship with another person is getting through the hard parts together, even imperfectly. “We’re complicated people and no one really knows everything going on in everyone’s mind,” Tawohid says. “But humans are awesome, truly.”

SINGAPORE: A Singaporean woman has sparked a lively discussion online after sharing that men have become a little too comfortable doing the bare minimum when it comes to dating.

Posting on the r/SingaporeRaw forum, she said that many of the men she has gone on dates with appear more than happy to leave all the planning and decision-making to her.

From choosing where to meet and what to eat to planning activities and keeping the conversation alive, she often finds herself doing all the heavy lifting while her date simply tags along for the ride.

“I don’t mind paying for myself on dates. In fact, I usually do,” she continued. “But what bothers me is when the guy doesn’t even make the slightest effort to plan anything. Like I’m expected to just decide everything. Where to go, what to eat, what to do… While he just shows up.”

She went on to share some of the more underwhelming dating experiences she has encountered.

“I’ve met guys whose idea of dating is literally just ‘come my house and watch Netflix,’ Then somehow the conversation starts, and it’s just dry replies, memes, or ‘Wyd’ at random hours.”

“One guy straight up told me relationships shouldn’t require effort, and it should just ‘flow naturally.’ Another said if I like him, I should just stop thinking so much and go with the vibe.”

After repeatedly running into similar situations, she decided to ask a question she felt was completely reasonable: “What exactly are you bringing to the relationship?”

The response, she said, wasn’t great. “Some got offended by the question. This isn’t a one-off experience either. I’ve met people like this from dating apps and even through mutual friends.”

“For context, I’m doing quite well for myself. Stable career, decent income, I can afford my own lifestyle, go on trips when I want, take care of my own stuff.”

Curious whether others were experiencing the same thing, she asked fellow Reddit users if this had become the norm in Singapore’s dating scene.

“Are more guys just not willing to put in effort anymore? Or am I somehow attracting the wrong crowd? Anyone else experienced this before? Or maybe I should just focus on myself and stop expecting much from dating for now?”

She added, “I don’t want to become cynical because I still believe there are plenty of good guys out there. But sometimes dating feels less like finding a partner and more like I’m carrying the whole interaction alone while the guy just follows along.”

“A lot of girls these days also give zero effort..”

In the comments, one user said she and her female friends have had many conversations about the state of dating in Singapore and found that many women share similar frustrations.

“I spoke to my girlies about it, and the majority of us are on the same page about Singapore dating scenes. And even if they put in effort, the 2nd date or late-night texts start heading somewhere completely different. Or even better, receiving an ‘I miss you’ message after the 3rd day of talking without meeting.”

Others, however, argued that this issue is not limited to either gender. One individual explained that the modern dating culture, particularly in the age of dating apps, has encouraged many people to put in less effort because there is always the possibility of finding someone new with a few swipes.

Another commented, “A lot of girls these days also give zero effort and don’t take initiatives in SG.”

A third added, “Guys do put in a lot of effort and try a lot. Especially in their early years of dating. They now know how to identify girls that are not worth the effort. Make yourself into someone worth the effort.”/TISG

In other news, a jobseeker was left shocked after what he thought was an interview for an admin position allegedly turned into a recruitment pitch for an insurance role and ended with the interviewer scolding him for not being “driven” enough.

Sharing his experience on the r/singaporejobs subreddit, the man said he had originally applied for an “admin and operations” executive position through JobStreet.

Read more: ‘Younger generations have no drive’: Interviewer lashes out after jobseeker rejects insurance role

This article (‘Why am I doing all the work?’: Singapore woman says too many men put minimal effort into dating) first appeared on The Independent Singapore News.

Humanity may be scrolling its way out of existence. 

Across the globe, fertility rates are plummeting. In 2023, the average number of births per woman worldwide fell beneath 2.1 — the minimum level necessary for averting population decline (also known as the “replacement rate”). And this collapse is not concentrated in just a handful of places; more than two-thirds of all nations now have below-replacement fertility.

While this crisis has been building for decades, its nature recently changed. In the 20th century, fertility fell primarily because couples started having fewer children. Now, it is falling mostly because fewer people are forming couples — or having sex at all.

If these trends continue, the consequences will be transformative — and possibly, catastrophic, as graying populations place unprecedented burdens on the remaining young. Vast countries will swiftly shrivel into city states. Today, Thailand is home to 63 million people. In two centuries, that will fall to 2 million, if the country’s current fertility rate persists. 

These are just 23rd-century problems. If sustained indefinitely, today’s global fertility rate would ensure humanity’s extinction.

And it’s partly your phone’s fault. 

Or so one leading theory goes. To make sense of recent fertility trends, some analysts have turned to the devices in their pockets. In the view of the journalist John Burn-Murdoch and social scientist Alice Evans, the smartphone helped birth the global spike in singledom. 

Their argument goes (partly) like this: As smartphone ownership skyrocketed globally during the 2010s, more and more young people tapped into a vast, omnipresent trove of personalized entertainment, which reduced their incentives to socialize in person. When you have virtually every movie, TV show, and pornography ever made at your fingertips, you no longer need parties for stimulation or diversion. And when you have an X or Facebook account, you can participate in a public conversation — and experience communal recognition — without ever leaving the comfort of your goon cave. 

Yet this withdrawal from in-person socializing reduces young people’s opportunities to meet romantic partners or develop social skills. Relationship formation falls as a result.

“The digital revolution has played a signal role in both degrading socialization for young adults and dividing young adults from one another,” Brad Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, told me.

And that revolution is only just beginning. After all, the tech sector’s quest to make social isolation more appealing did not end with the advent of the iPhone, Netflix, or TikTok.

Since 2022, more than 1 billion people have gained access to an infinitely patient conversation partner — one who can speak knowledgeably about all of their interests and listen compassionately to all of their problems. Thanks to Claude and ChatGPT, hermits can not only enjoy perpetual stimulation without social contact but also forms of emotional support that had previously required an intimate friend, family member, lover, or licensed therapist. 

And these are the worst versions of these products we’ll ever see. Future iterations may take even more engaging forms; someday, Claude might be able to get it on. 

This makes the “smartphone theory” one of the more important hypotheses of our time. If its narrative is correct — and there is some compelling evidence in its favor — then the fertility crisis is liable to deepen in the coming years. And AI might be replacing more than just our jobs. 

Amusing ourselves to abstinence

Before digging into the “smartphone theory” of falling birth rates, it’s worth clarifying its scope. 

No one thinks that digital technology is the primary cause of declining fertility, a trend that predates the iPhone by more than a century in wealthy countries (Swedish farmers did not start having fewer kids in the 1880s because of TikTok). 

Rather, the main drivers of the long-term fertility descent appear to be foundational features of modernity: When scientific systems of healthcare and sanitation reduce child mortality, couples feel less compelled to have six kids in the hopes that three might survive. When industrial progress boosts the returns to education, parents have an incentive to invest more resources in each individual child’s development, making large families harder to sustain. And when women secure political rights, economic autonomy, and reliable contraception, fewer choose to spend decades of their lives perpetually pregnant.

Yet these structural forces only get us so far. Modern medicine, economic development, and women’s emancipation may have put humanity on the path to collapsing fertility. But some other factor recently sped us on our way: In the aughts, fertility rates actually plateaued globally and rose in advanced economies — before abruptly plummeting in the 2010s. 

During that same decade, rates of singledom also spiked. In countries as varied as the United States, South Korea, Turkey, Tunisia, and Finland, young adults became less likely to have a romantic partner. And this “relationship recession” seems to have fueled the post-2010 drop in fertility. According to a 2025 study published in Nature, mothers in most high-income countries are having about as many children as they did decades ago. Yet fertility rates are falling nonetheless, due to a steep drop in the share of women who have any children at all.

The coupling collapse can’t be explained by a sudden expansion of women’s rights; it is happening even in deeply patriarchal societies like Saudi Arabia. Nor is it easily attributed to economic turmoil; rates of romantic partnership have fallen in both high-growth and low-growth nations, advanced economies and developing ones, countries rattled by the 2008 crisis and those largely unharmed by it.

Smartphones, on the other hand, were in the right places at the right times.

In country after country, the rise in singles — and drop in birth rates — coincided with the mass adoption of smartphones, according to an analysis from Burn-Murdoch, the journalist at the Financial Times.

Correlation isn’t causation. But there’s reason to think this timing isn’t coincidental.

In one recent study, economists from the University of Cincinnati examined how teen fertility changed in different American and British localities as they gained access to 4G mobile networks. They found that the arrival of high-speed internet consistently accelerated declines in adolescent birth rates and conceptions. Their explanation for this phenomenon is straightforward: When the center of adolescent life moves online, in-personal socializing declines — and with it, opportunities for one thing to lead to another.

Time-use data lends credence to this theory. Across 21 European nations, the share of people who got together with their friends on a daily basis fell from 21 percent in 2006 to 12 percent in 2022. In the US, meanwhile, time spent on in-person social interaction has plunged during the smartphone era.

Taken together, these data points appear to tell a simple story: When humans acquire 24/7 access to social media platforms and unlimited digital entertainment, they feel less need to hang out with peers in the real world — and demand more from potential partners.

“When phones become ever more engaging and ever more exciting, then you want a super engaging person,” Evans, the social scientist, said. “He’s got to be better than an episode of Bridgerton.”

Thus, some retreat from the frictions of in-person socialization entirely. Others forfeit opportunities to hone their social skills or  find suitable but imperfect mates. Sexlessness ensues. 

How AI could make sex obsolete

It isn’t hard to see how AI could accelerate these trends. 

Streaming and social media might have made the solitary life less dull and uncomfortable. But Pornhub won’t talk with you about your career anxieties, favorite Civil War battle, or debilitating fear of iguanas. And TikTok won’t provide discrete reassurance about that new mole on your chest. Before 2022, securing this sort of sympathetic ear typically required forging and sustaining real-world relationships. 

But now, Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT are happy to oblige.

Thus, if smartphones were outcompeting offline interaction before they hosted chatbots, they seem even better equipped to do so today. 

Separately, AI may also widen the gap between young people’s romantic expectations and dating realities.

Frequent interaction with a chatbot — who perpetually centers your concerns, never loses patience, and always has something to say about your topics of interest — could  encourage unrealistic standards for human conversation, particularly among those who’ve used AI intensively from an early age. 

Of course, these are mere speculations. And research into AI’s impacts on in-person socialization and dating is limited. But there is some evidence that chatbots could be expediting young people’s drift towards solitude and sexlessness. 

In a study published in 2025 from OpenAI and MIT, researchers tracked 981 participants’ use of AI chatbots over a four-week period. They found that subjects who voluntarily spent more time talking with LLMs during that span became more socially isolated by the study’s end. 

This doesn’t necessarily mean that heavy chatbot use caused people to socialize less with other humans. After all, those who lack hangout opportunities might be more inclined to talk with chatbots. And yet, those who used AI intensively during the study had roughly as active social lives as other participants when the trial period began. Therefore, it seems likely that — at least in some cases — bonding with ChatGPT led to social isolation rather than vice versa.

Meanwhile, survey data suggest that people are turning to chatbots for companionship or romantic stimulation in growing numbers. In a 2025 poll from Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute, 19 percent of American adults — including 31 percent of young men — said they had chatted with an AI system meant to simulate a romantic partner. 

More recently, the institute examined the use of these pseudo-significant others by young Americans in committed relationships. In its survey, 15 percent of young adults with human partners reported having a secret AI romantic relationship. And among this significant minority, more than 70 percent of men — and nearly 60 percent of women — agreed with the statement, “I wish conversations with my partner were like AI.” And more than half of both male and female users of AI companions said they wished their human partners “behaved like my AI.”

Perhaps more concerningly, respondents who used AI companions regularly were more likely to be in unstable relationships — in which they often thought that their partnership was in trouble, or discussed ending the relationship, or had broken up and gotten back together.

Once again, causality is difficult to determine. People in unstable relationships might be more inclined to seek artificial companionship. But chatbots’ influence on their users’ expectations are likely a factor, according to the report’s co-author Brian Willoughby. 

“The more I talk to an AI companion that is always validating me, always taking my side, and always talking about what I want to talk about,” Willoughby said, “the more conversations with my real-life partner — who has their own views — will start paling in comparison to those AI interactions.”

And silicon substitutes for human intimacy will only grow more sophisticated and holistic in the coming decades. Or so many in and around the tech industry believe. 

Daniel Faggella, founder of Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research, believes that advances in AI, virtual reality, and mechanized sex toys will eventually render human intercourse an obsolete pastime — one largely confined to nostalgists and connoisseurs, like driving stick shift. 

“The great sexual organ is the brain,” Faggella told me. “If you have the visuals, the voice, the haptics, the sound, real-time biofeedback — and even very crude physical implements to go along with them — I think you’re going to beat the human flesh experience every time.”

I suspect that sex has more staying power than Faggella allows. But erotic AI doesn’t need to fully displace intimacy to accelerate the dating recession and fertility crisis. It merely needs to lure a sizable minority of men and women away from the hassle and heartbreak of human relationships. Judging by existing trends, superintelligent sexbots seem liable to meet that challenge.

The future could be brighter

AI’s effects on human sociality remain uncertain. In theory, artificial intelligence could benefit human relationships and fertility — by, for example, helping awkward adolescents refine their conversational skills or providing troubled couples with on-demand counseling.

Moreover, some experts question how much smartphones actually changed fertility trends. In the view of University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, the fundamental causes of the 2010s fertility collapse are long-term structural forces — among them, secularization, the “dissolution of old social networks,” and the rise of a service economy in which women’s relative economic power has increased. 

Social media and streaming may have accelerated these processes, in Fernández-Villaverde’s view, by diffusing feminist ideas: Over the past decade, women in patriarchal societies have gained unprecedented access to commentary and dramas that affirm their desire for autonomy and idealize egalitarian marriages (Evans and Burn-Murdoch also put considerable weight on this dynamic). But he believes that this merely hastened already inevitable declines. 

“Cellphones matter a little bit,” Fernández-Villaverde said. “But it’s not because people are spending their whole life playing Pokémon. It’s because they’re seeing what the rest of the world looks like and deciding that they want to do things differently.”

Nevertheless, it is clear that mass smartphone adoption coincided with falling in-person socialization — and rising singledom — in all manner of different countries. And there are some signs that AI is further displacing face-to-face interaction and distorting relationship expectations. In any case, the tech industry has a strong incentive to generate evermore compelling substitutes for human connection.

“Here in the Bay Area, all these startups are trying to make apps that will compete in the attention economy,” Evans said. “All these genius software engineers are trying to make something that hooks you in. So I’d predict that the market will enable AI to outcompete humans — they will be funnier, more charming, and enticing.”

At the very least, that possibility warrants concern, given the potential consequences for both fertility and human welfare. 

If the past decade is any guide, technological progress may be speeding us toward a future of ubiquitous ghost towns, scarce children, and nursing homes full of gray-haired hermits, each passing their days with VR paramours as civilization slowly unwinds. 

There are worse fates. But ideally, humanity would hold out for a better one.